Electronic mail systems provide notification of received emails and are used to compose and send emails. The user interface for email systems are text based and provide relatively primitive and non-intuitive email message notifications and navigation. For instance, email systems today provide a text listing of received emails. The text listings can include the name of the email sender, the subject of the email, and the date and time the email was sent. The graphics associated with the emails may include an envelope that indicates whether or not the email has been opened and then possibly an exclamation point or flag to identify an important email.
These email systems do not provide intuitive human identifications of the email sender. For example, the person receiving the email may not immediately recognize the sender name contained in the email message, and particular emails may not be readily identified within the morass of other received emails in the same user inbox. In these cases, certain emails might not be promptly identified, opened and read. Even worse, an important email might be perceived as junk mail and inadvertently deleted when the email sender name is not recognized. In an opposite situation, the email recipient may constantly open emails from unknown senders thinking the emails may be from an important contact with an unfamiliar name.
In yet another inconvenient situation, an email user might not remember the email address or name of a previous email sender. The user might then be forced to manually sort through hundreds of previously received emails to locate the previously received email message. Other problems also arise when sending emails to particular email addresses. The user first has to locate and extract the email address, if the address even exists, from a contacts list. Otherwise, the user has to sift through previously received email messages for the desired email address. The user then has to cut and paste the email address from the located email into a new email message. Needless to say, these tasks are time consuming and awkward.
The present invention addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art.
The foregoing and other objects, features and advantages of the invention will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.